The Rise of the Kaia Public Chain: A New Star in the Korean Stablecoin Wave

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become a hot topic in the crypto market due to its strong token performance. Since its official launch in August 2024, Kaia has been committed to enhancing its technical capabilities and完善生态系统. Recently, its movements in the stablecoin and payment sectors have attracted widespread attention within the industry. Senior officials from the foundation stated that Kaia's "stablecoin summer" is coming soon, hinting that its fiat-backed token plan is accelerating.

With the new government in South Korea taking office, supporting the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become a new policy direction. The Kaia team announced that it will collaborate with several well-known technology companies to launch a Korean won stablecoin. This news quickly triggered a market reaction, with related concept stocks surging, and the price of Kaia tokens rising from about $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimistic expectations for the prospects of local Korean stablecoin projects.

Policy Tailwind Supports the Launch of the Kaia Stablecoin Project

In 2025, after the new president of South Korea proposed a policy to support the local currency stablecoin, Kaia swiftly responded and announced a plan for a Korean won stablecoin. This news triggered a strong market reaction, with related concept stocks rising sharply, demonstrating investors' eager anticipation for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being driven by several well-known tech companies and is currently still in the planning stage, with a specific issuance timeline yet to be determined. Industry insiders believe that, with its mature digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment systems, the relevant partners are expected to become an important driving force for the development of local stablecoins.

Currently, the South Korean government is brewing the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" and actively exploring a regulatory framework that allows private institutions to issue stablecoins. The draft bill aims to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, allowing non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins. According to this proposal, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be under the Financial Services Commission, rather than the Bank of Korea. At the same time, the bill significantly lowers the regulatory threshold, reducing the capital requirement for issuers from the previous 5 billion KRW to 500 million KRW.

However, according to the South Korean constitution, the right to issue legal currency belongs to the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles when issuing fiat-backed tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns over these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins pegged to the Korean won could lead to "currency runs" and affect the competitiveness of the won.

Nonetheless, the head of the Digital Assets Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that they will support private issuance and plan to clarify the legal provisions for stablecoin legalization in the "Basic Law." The technology group that Kaia relies on has a large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, which provides a convenient channel for the practical application of future stablecoins.

However, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project remain uncertain. On one hand, issues related to currency sovereignty and anti-money laundering compliance still need to be addressed; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin also need to be validated. In addition, several potential competitors have also set their sights on this market. Recently, several large banks in South Korea publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins, competing with the tokenized deposits and wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiments of the Bank of Korea.

Therefore, although Kaia's stablecoin project was launched amid policy opportunities and sparked heated market discussions, it still faces many challenges in obtaining regulatory approval and being successfully implemented.

Social giants join forces, with 250 million potential users

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network mainly targeting the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known blockchain projects, and officially launched in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with mainstream social platforms.

The social platforms behind it have a large user base in countries like South Korea and Japan, with monthly active users of approximately 50 million and 170 million, respectively. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users from these two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public blockchain, has been regarded as one of the potential stocks to promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from well-known investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before merging into Kaia, both original projects had achieved certain results in their respective fields. One project was launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the South Korean blockchain network, with its user base experiencing a 1,100% growth by 2023, reaching 873,000; the other project was launched in 2022 and provided an NFT platform within its ecosystem, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherited the DeFi, gaming, NFT, payment, and other application scenarios of both projects, realizing a complementarity of technology and users.

As a Layer 1 public chain compatible with Ethereum, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes an advanced consensus framework. Its consensus algorithm is based on an optimized Istanbul BFT, allowing for quick final confirmation of blocks and supporting multi-node participation. The official documentation states that the Kaia network can handle up to 4000 transactions per second, with a block generation time of only 1 second and instant transaction finality.

The Kaia network nodes are divided into consensus nodes, proxy nodes, and endpoint nodes. The consensus nodes are managed by core operators and are responsible for block generation and verification. The network design ensures that more than 50 nodes can participate in consensus, balancing throughput and decentralization.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation functions, greatly simplifying the user experience; at the same time, it integrates identities and payment channels from mainstream social platforms, allowing ordinary users to access on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains compatibility with EVM chains like Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its integration capabilities with industry-leading cross-chain bridges provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

At the beginning of its launch, Kaia's user and funding metrics were still in the initial stage. By mid-2025, Kaia is ranked approximately among the top fifty globally in the DeFi TVL rankings, reflecting the initial scale of its ecological development. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's officials have disclosed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volume grew rapidly in the early stages of launch, but the overall level is still lower than that of mature mainstream public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

In terms of ecosystem construction, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of two original projects, forming a comprehensive ecosystem that covers multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and real-world assets (RWA). According to official statistics, there are already more than 420 decentralized applications and game services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

To promote ecological development, the Kaia Foundation has also launched the Builder Support Program, Kaia Wave. This program aims to provide comprehensive support to promising Dapps, helping them reach consumer users in both Web2 and Web3, and gain additional advantages from mainstream social platforms, Web3 marketing alliances, creators, and Kaia's vertical services. According to official documents, the Kaia Wave program will offer KAIA tokens worth a total of $10 million, specifically for user acquisition and rewards.

In the DeFi space, Kaia has already launched multiple decentralized exchanges and staking, lending projects, and the platform also supports infrastructure such as stablecoins and cross-chain bridges. In terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the user base of the original NFT platform. Its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms, and some game developers have begun to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

In terms of distribution and user reach for Mini DApps, the Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem. The Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia blockchain and is accessible to users through the official accounts of mainstream instant messaging software, without the need to download or install any new applications, allowing access to games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps directly within the chat interface. In January of this year, Kaia jointly launched the first batch of 32 Mini DApps, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, and trade NFTs with just one click, without needing to install a separate client.

In its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: in early 2025, it has launched a USD stablecoin yield product on the cooperative platform, with future plans including the introduction of lending, perpetual contracts, payments, and asset tokenization DeFi protocols, as well as achieving seamless exchange functionality between the Korean won and stablecoins.

In May of this year, the world's largest stablecoin issuer deployed its USDT stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border transfer services to nearly 200 million users, marking Kaia's further expansion in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem and promoting the use case of "message as entry, on-chain as payment" together with industry partners.